No Mythologies to Follow

The new album from Copenhagen electronic artist MØ—aka Karen Marie Ørsted—ditches shock-rap for more mature but no less immediate electro-pop exploring the swirling confusion of young adulthood.

Five years is a long time, especially in your early 20s, as you try on certain identities and cast off others in search of one you feel more or less comfortable in. Case in point: five years ago, Karen Marie Ørsted was writing Peaches-aping novelty songs titled "When I Saw His Cock", which included raps as trashy as her beats. Fast forward half of a decade, and the only thing the music of the Copenhagen native, now 25, shares with her earliest demos is an omnivorous musical appetite, one that synthesizes a number of of-the-moment sounds on her self-assured debut as MØ, No Mythologies to Follow.

The album finds MØ (pronounced somewhere between "Muh" and the sound a cow makes) ditching shock-rap for more mature but no less immediate electro-pop that explores the swirling confusion of young adulthood. Its sound is one that's equally as indebted to the forward-thinking Scandinavian pop scene she comes from as it is to the sounds of Southern rap and modern bass music. It's the kind of output you'd expect from an artist who's grown up with instant, unlimited access to music from every corner of the globe. This melting-pot approach pervades No Mythologies to Follow, which was produced almost entirely by Ronni Vindahl, a fellow Dane who makes up one-half of No Wav., the production team that includes Robin Hannibal, aka the dude responsible for the sensuous, restrained arrangements found on last year's debut from Rhye, Woman.

MØ and Vindahl are a good pairing, sharing an easy chemistry as collaborators; Vindahl's production keeps up with but never eclipses MØ, and she doesn't bat an eyelash at his production, which has some bite. Most of the album's twelve tracks are built on top of a sturdy bedrock of tick-tick-ticking 808s and swarms of pulsing synths; "Maiden" and "Red in the Grey" get the throb of post-dubstep right, and glockenspiels and horns play nice with molasses-thick claps and a gurgling bassline on "Pilgrim". There's often a lot happening on these tracks, and this is only compounded by the fact MØ loves her multi-tracked vocals and ad-libs. It has the effect of turning her into a one-woman girl group—the massive lurch of "Fire Rides", for instance, leaves plenty of space for MØ to harmonize with herself, and she stuffs the track to the brim with ecstatic shouts and fists-in-the-air woops.

At this point you're probably getting the impression that No Mythologies to Follow isn't exactly a study in minimalism; combined with her everything-is-a-hook style of songwriting, MØ ends up building a rather outsized persona for herself over the course of the album. It's never of the one-note all-caps variety, but it sometimes obscures nuanced performances and her ability to simultaneously nail a bunch of conflicting emotions, often within the span of a single line. "I never want to know the name of your new girlfriend" she wails on "Never Wanna Know", both because she's not sure she can handle the piece of information but also because she recognizes that knowing gives her another reason to obsess over her ex rather than move forward and on.

At the heart of everything is MØ's voice, a powerful and versatile tool comfortable expressing emotional turmoil as it is wearing a fuck-the-haters scowl. You can almost see her stretching on the tips of her toes as she soars into the clouds during the chorus of the aforementioned "Never Wanna Know", and she plays a convincing house diva on "Slow Love", a Balearic slinker that recalls John Talabot at his loosest. And although it makes no apologies for the bits and pieces it takes from her contemporaries, No Mythologies to Follow doesn't work because it assembles the right ingredients in the right amount—it works because a likable persona is something you just can't teach.